Despite Anti-Vitamin D Bias, CDC Stumbles on Deficiency Link to H1N1 Deaths
September 22, 2009
Mercola.com
By Dr. Mercola
So far, Swine flu, H1N1, has killed thirty-six children in U.S. and analysis of CDC data indicates Vitamin D deficient children at higher risk of death.
The CDC did not realize they discovered this. However, anyone familiar with the Vitamin D literature will recognize it.
Almost two-thirds of the dead children had epilepsy, cerebral palsy, or other neurodevelopmental conditions like mental retardation.
All of these neurological conditions are associated with childhood Vitamin D deficiency. Exacerbating the problem further, many of these kids take anticonvulsant drugs, which lower Vitamin D levels.
58 million American children are Vitamin D deficient; 7.6 million are severely deficient.
When researchers looked at more than 6,000 American kids (age one to 21) who were carefully selected to be representative of the average American child. 9 percent of the kids had 25(OH)D levels less than 15 ng/mL and 70 percent had levels less than 30 ng/mL.
Click here for the full report from Mercola.com
‘Social’ Phones to Reveal All About Your Caller
September 20, 2009
Financial Times
By Chris Nuttall
Forget caller ID. A coming wave of “social” mobile phones is likely to tell you everything you ever wanted to know and more about the person calling you.
An application called Robo.to, available in the fourth quarter on the iPhone and handsets that run Google’s Android operating system, offers a stream of information about callers, including personal videos, photos and their current location.
It is an example of the “social address book” – the reinvention of a core handset feature that carriers will leverage to earn fresh revenues and win back consumer attention lost to iPhone applications and media companies’ services.
With Robo.to, when the phone rings, a user can see a video recorded by the caller as a “status update” that shows their mood and where they are.
The screen can also feature their latest Twitter messages, their name and title from the Linkedin professional network, recent photos posted to the Flickr photo service and a map of their location.
Rey Flemings, chief executive of Particle, Robo.to’s parent company, says the service should come into its own in 2010 as more phones feature a forward-facing camera for video calls.
Handset makers are also seizing on the popularity of social networks to make their phones more appealing. Motorola’s latest phone, the Cliq, features “Motoblur” software that merges tweets, e-mail and Facebook status messages under the address book listings of contacts. Motorola described the Cliq, or Dext as it will be known in Europe, as “the first phone with social skills” when it unveiled it this month.
However, the Cliq was preceded by another Android phone, the HTC Hero, which has HTC Sense software. This has a similar interface to Motoblur, grouping photos, e-mails and status updates with a contact’s information in its address book.
In July, Nokia bought the German company Cellity, which had developed a “phonebook 2.0” product merging contact information with social networks.
Handset makers are aiming to meet the priorities of carriers with the new capabilities. The merging of information draws users into using more multimedia and data to update their networks, increasing revenues.
“Carriers want to help users socialise their address books. That’s the big 2010 emphasis for them as it unlocks so much power,” says one industry executive.
“The carriers know your current location, who your friends are and what media you are consuming, so this will open up the advertising business for them.”
Click here for the full report from the Financial Times
Obama Says Financial Regulations Must Be Strengthened Globally
September 19, 2009
Bloomberg
By Nicholas Johnston
President Barack Obama said tougher financial regulations are needed worldwide to protect consumers, provide economic stability and prevent future crises.
With the leaders from the Group of 20 nations set to meet next week in Pittsburgh, Obama said in his weekly address on the radio and Internet that international cooperation has “stopped our economic freefall.”
“We know we still have a lot to do, in conjunction with nations around the world, to strengthen the rules governing financial markets and ensure that we never again find ourselves in the precarious situation we found ourselves in just one year ago,” Obama said.
The administration has proposed an overhaul of U.S. financial regulations including oversight of the systemic risk large financial institutions pose to the economy, new ways for the government to dismantle failed companies and a regulator to oversee financial products for consumers.
Obama reiterated his calls for Congress to act on his regulatory proposals, which he also made in a speech on Wall Street Sept. 13.
“As I told leaders of our financial community in New York City earlier this week, a return to normalcy can’t breed complacency,” Obama said in today’s address. “Our government needs to fundamentally reform the rules governing financial firms and markets to meet the challenges of the 21st century.”
Oversight for Consumers
Obama said a central element to this regulatory overhaul is a new agency to oversee consumer products, including mortgages and credit cards.
“We need clear rules, clearly enforced. And that’s what this agency will do,” Obama said.
Obama said lobbyists for financial institutions are already fighting against new regulations.
“We cannot let the narrow interests of a few come before the interests of all of us,” Obama said. “We cannot forget how close we came to the brink, and perpetuate the broken system and breakdown of responsibility that made it possible.”
In the Republican address, North Carolina Representative Sue Myrick focused on Obama’s health-care proposals, which are being debated in Congress. She said the plan being offered by Obama and congressional Democrats would lead to government-run insurance and that would mean delays in care.
Access to Care
“Every family that confronts a serious illness should have access to the highest-quality care at the lowest possible cost, with no delays,” Myrick said.
Obama has said he favors a government-run insurance program to compete with private insurers. While he has suggested he wouldn’t make it a requirement as part of final legislation, other Democrats including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California have said it must be part of any bill.
“Replacing your current health care with a government-run system is not the answer,” Myrick said.
Myrick also said the health-care proposals would lead to tax increases on small businesses that would lead to the elimination of more than 1.6 million jobs.
“This is the worst possible time to be imposing new, job- killing taxes,” Myrick said.
Click here for the full report from Bloomberg
New Trojan Virus Poses Online Banking Threat
September 21, 2009
Times Online
By Mike Harvey
Cyber criminals have created a highly sophisticated Trojan virus that steals online banking log-in details from infected computers.
The Clampi virus, which is spreading rapidly across hundreds of thousands of computers in Britain and the United States, infects computers when users visit websites that host a malicious code.
Once on the computer, the virus sits unnoticed until the user logs on to bank, credit card or other financial websites. It then captures log-in and password information and sends it to a server run by the attackers. They can then tell the compromised computer to send money to accounts that they control, or they can buy goods with the stolen credit card details.
The trojan has a list of more than 4,500 finance-related websites that it monitors, including British high street banks. Security experts warned that it was one of the stealthiest and most pervasive threats to computers using the Microsoft Windows operating systems.
Orla Cox, security operations manager with Symantec, the online security company, said: “Clampi is a complex threat. People are only just beginning to understand how it operates.”
Researchers have found that the list of sites that Clampi is monitoring includes banks, credit card companies, online casinos, e-mail, wire transfer services, retail sites, utilities, share brokerages, mortgage lenders and government sites.
Ms Cox said: “The first big wave was in the US in July, but it is spreading around the world, particularly English-language countries. We have seen samples of it targeting UK high street banks. There is potential for another wave to come.”
It is estimated that more than 1,000 out of 40,000 or more infected computers have been in Britain. Only computers running Microsoft Windows are affected. Most of the infections seem to have occurred among small and medium-sized businesses, many of which have been reluctant to reveal how they have fallen victim.
In America, $75,000 (£46,000) was stolen in July from Slack Auto Parts, a car parts supplier in Gainesville, Georgia. In August, criminals used Clampi to steal online banking details for the public school district in Sands Spring, Oklahoma. The attackers then submitted a series of false payroll payments, totalling more than $150,000.
The attack was one of a series on American schools in which criminals hired unsuspecting money mules — people who transfer money or fraudulently obtained high-value goods — to receive the transfers of stolen cash and then wire the money out of the country. Cyber criminals stole more than $700,000 from the Western Beaver School District in 74 fraudulent electronic transfers, The Washington Post reported.
Clampi is one of a new wave of viruses to target the online banking system. Its emergence came as security experts warned that malicious websites hiding trojan viruses were no longer confined to sites such as gambling and pornography.
A recent report by IBM security systems found an increase in malicious content such as viruses on trusted sites, including popular search engines, blogs, online magazines and mainstream news sites. The number of links to malicious web pages rose by more than 500 per cent in the first half of this year. Last week, attackers placed a virus in an advert on the website of The New York Times.
Trojan viruses such as Clampi accounted for 55 per cent of all new malicious software in the first half of the year, IBM said, up from 46 per cent for the same period last year. Researchers say that variants of Clampi — also known as Ligats or Ilomo — have been around since 2005, but the new version appears to be spreading more quickly.
Heading off hackers
Do not click on suspicious links to unknown sites within e-mails, instant messages or social networking sites
Be cautious about doing business with unknown e-commerce sites and always use a credit card, not a debit card
Install a comprehensive security solution and keep it up-to-date
Use a security solution that offers browser protection and a website rating service Browser protection will block questionable downloads from getting on to your computer, and website rating services can warn you if a site is infected
Secure your wi-fi connection with a strong password to ensure that others cannot connect to your network and access data stored on your computer
Any user whose system has been infected by Clampi should immediately change any and all passwords used on that system for any websites, but particularly financial credential.
Click here for the full report from Times Online
Sex and Relationships: Why Is Big Pharma Trying to Tell You How to Have Sex?
September 14, 2009
AlterNet
By Joann Wypijewski
In the beginning there was sex. And sex begat skill, and skill (or its absence) begat judgment, and judgment begat insecurity, and insecurity begat doctors’ visits, which begat treatments, which have flourished into a multibillion-dollar industry, so that sex between men and women is today almost inconceivable without the shadow of disorder, dysfunction, the “little blue pill” or myriad other medical interventions designed to bring sex back to some longed-for beginning: a state of certified healthfulness, the illusion of normal.
Sex has been missing from the healthcare debate. A shame, because sexual health, and disputes over its meaning, reveals most nakedly the problem at the core of a medical system that requires profit, huge profit, hence sickness, or people who can come to believe they are sick or deformed or lacking and therefore in need of a pill, a procedure or device. Case in point: female sexual dysfunction (FSD), said to afflict great numbers of women–43 percent according to some, 70 percent according to others, an “epidemic” in the heterosexual bedroom according to Oprah. Ka-ching!
More on that in a moment, but first a bit about FSD’s precursor, hysteria, and the rustic science of bringing women off.
In my room is a curious artifact of late-nineteenth-century medicine: a heavy wooden chair with a cast-iron lever extending up to each arm, within easy grasp of the sitter. Pull the levers, and powerful springs activate a mechanism below to rock or jolt the sitter (depending on the vigor of the thrust) in a manner intended to produce the healthful effects of horseback riding for ladies suffering from “pelvic congestion.”
This particular jolting chair was discovered by an antiques-dealer friend, Gilbert Ruff, in Chester, Vermont, but its provenance as an invention reaches back to a fabled arena of psychosexual medicine, the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, and to Jean-Martin Charcot, teacher of Freud and father of modern neurology. Charcot was an enthusiast for the idea that women with a grab bag of complaints, from irritability to sleeplessness to sexual fantasies and ungratified desire, were diseased. Hysteroneurasthenic disorder was the name for their sickness then. For some, he prescribed long train trips over rough track beds. If they took another doctor’s advice and sat in the rail carriage “so as to be leaning forward,” they might have got surprising relief. But such journeys were impractical, so Charcot and his colleagues devised a more homely vibration therapy.
Various iterations of the jolting chair entered commercial self-help markets. Mine was manufactured in New York, and contemporary advertisements promoted it to strengthen “the parts that are usually most neglected by the fair beings.” Now, a woman might enjoy the humpy bounce of this chair, varying the intensity, parting her legs, leaning forward and breathing deep, even calibrating her motions to the rhythms of a French dance tune, or gavotte, written for the purpose, but the jolting chair never proved as efficient at achieving that “hysterical paroxysm” of relief that doctors had been inducing in their female patients since at least the first century AD simply with their fingers. Nor could it compete with pulsing water cures or that ultimate women’s aid, the vibrator, also invented by a doctor and first used on hysterics at Salpêtrière.
As Rachel Maines demonstrates in her delightfully illuminating history The Technology of Orgasm, making patients out of sexually unsatisfied women was good business. The afflicted would neither die nor be cured but required regular massage treatments, weekly, sometimes daily, for an hour or even three. By one 1863 estimate, such therapies accounted for three-quarters of physicians’ business, but doctors seem to have got no pleasure out of diddling women. It was, Maines says, “the job nobody wanted.” And bringing women off was work, abstracted from sex (i.e., the robust progression from male hard-on to vaginal penetration to male orgasm) and requiring time and skill. With the vibrator, doctors’ productivity exploded, as sixty-minute visits shrank to ten, raising more revenue from more patients per day, until the device became so popular and multipurpose (Sears marketed a home vibrator with attachments for beating eggs, churning butter, operating a fan) that the medical profession had worked itself out of a job. Miraculously, the sick were healed as soon as the first vibrator popped up in porno in the 1920s.
Click here to continue reading the full article from AlterNet
Hear me LIVE with Dr. Coldwell Monday 9/28
September 21, 2009 by KT
Filed under Kevin's Blog
Monday, Sept 28th at 1pm eastern, I am going to be live on the air with my close friend and expert in matters of life, health, and happiness, Dr. Leonard Coldwell.
Listen live from your computer at: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/TheDrColdwellReport OR on your phone at: 646-727-3185
Dr. Coldwell is a 9 times Mega Best Selling Author with 4 new books that just hit the market and 6 new books that will be available shortly. We are going to reveal the secrets we have both learned about life, success, health and financial wealth!
Experts call Dr. Leonard Coldwell the world leading educational self-help expert for cancer and stress related illnesses. (Burn-out Syndrome, Depression, Anxiety) Two independent clinical studies came to the conclusion that Dr. Coldwell has the highest cancer cure rate in the world (92.3%) and has seen over 35,000 patients in his lifetime as well as over 2.2 million Seminar attendees.
Dr. Coldwell’s books and IBMS™ CD audio systems have saved more lives than all the MD’s put together. Dr Coldwell’s Instinct Based Medicine® System is the only system in the world that has again and again eliminated the root cause of cancer and all disease.”
Dr. Thomas Hohn MD NMD, a leading medical authority in Europe, has ordered Dr. Coldwell’s newest book: “The Only Answer to Cancer” and so should you if you want to find out how to eliminate the root causes of cancer and all diseases! Available now from www.InstinctBasedMedicineStore.com
For other information please visit
Talk to you next Monday at 1pm EST!
KT
Europe Faces Spread of ‘Severe’ Disease, Doctor Warns
September 19, 2009
The Scotland Herald
The United States and Europe face a new health threat from a mosquito-borne disease far more unpleasant than the West Nile virus that swept into North America a decade ago, a U.S. expert said on Friday.
Chikungunya virus has spread beyond Africa since 2005, causing outbreaks and scores of fatalities in India and the French island of Reunion. It also has been detected in Italy, where it has begun to spread locally, as well as France.
“We’re very worried,” Dr. James Diaz of the Louisiana University Health Sciences Center told a meeting on airlines, airports and disease transmission sponsored by the independent U.S. National Research Council.
“Unlike West Nile virus, where nine out of 10 people are going to be totally asymptomatic, or may have a mild headache or a stiff neck, if you get Chikungunya you’re going to be sick,” he said.
“The disease can be fatal. It’s a serious disease,” Diaz added. “There is no vaccine.”
Chikungunya infection causes fever, headache, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, muscle pain, rash and joint pain. Symptoms can last a few weeks, though some suffers have reported incapacitating joint pain or arthritis lasting months.
The disease was first discovered in Tanzania in 1952. Its name means “that which bends up” in the Makonde language spoken in northern Mozambique and southeastern Tanzania.
The virus could spread globally now because it can be carried by the Asian tiger mosquito, which is found in Asia, Africa, Europe, the Americas, Australia and New Zealand.
In the United States, the mosquito species tends to live in southern regions east of the Mississippi but has been found as far afield as western Texas, Minnesota and New Jersey.
Health officials are greatly concerned about the appearance of Chikungunya in the islands of the Indian Ocean – Mauritius, Seychelles and Reunion – which have beach resorts frequented by European tourists.
“It is hyper-endemic in the islands of the Indian Ocean,” Diaz told the meeting.
“Travel by air will import the infected mosquitoes and humans,” he added. “Chikungunya is coming.”
Diaz warned of possible double-infections involving Chikungunya and dengue fever or malaria, which are also carried by the Asian tiger mosquito.
The spread of the disease could be greatest in so-called mega-cities such as Mumbai and Mexico City, which have large and impoverished populations, poor health controls and water systems that provide ready breeding grounds for mosquitoes, Diaz said.
West Nile, spread by a different mosquito species, first appeared in New York in 1999 and now can be found in most of North America.
Click here for the full report from The Scotland Herald
Leaked UN Report Claims Swine Flu Could “Kill Millions”
September 21, 2009
Natural News
by Mike Adams
A UN report leaked to The Observer claims that swine flu could “kill millions” of people in poor nations and cause a total breakdown of society unless wealthy nations come up with US$1.5 billion to pay for pandemic vaccines and anti-viral drugs. It warns that the fragile economies of developing nations could be completely destroyed by the breakdown of social services, infrastructure and medical care.
The report specifically says:
“Countries where health services are overburdened by diseases, such as HIV/Aids, tuberculosis and malaria, will have great difficulty managing the surge of cases. And if the electricity and water sectors are not able to maintain services, this will have serious implications for the ability of the health sector to function. …If suppliers of fuel, food, telecommunications, finance or transport services have not developed plans as to how they would continue to deliver their services, the consequences could be significantly intensified.”
This UN report identifies 75 countries that remain vulnerable to this chaos scenario: 6 nations in South America, 21 nations from Asia and 40 in Africa. The only way to prevent the possible collapse of these nations, the report says, is for this $1.5 billion to be spent on vaccines and anti-viral drugs.
There is no mention in the report of teaching the citizens of poor nations how to use their own local indigenous medicine, or how to get more vitamin D from sunlight, or even how to boost their immune system health through dietary changes. The suggestions of the entire report come down to just two things: Vaccines and anti-viral drugs.
Just another UN medical scam
So what’s the real story behind all this? All be blunt: In my opinion, this report is just another Big Pharma scam. It’s designed to scare people into sending even more money to the drug companies to buy their drugs and vaccines. The threat of the “complete collapse” of these poorer nations is designed to leverage first-world fear to motivate these nations to spend more money on precisely the things that make the pharmaceutical industry wealthy.
There’s no doubt that the citizens of poor nations need help improving their health, but that should be accomplished through education and the use of local medicinal plants, not through the chemical intervention of greedy corporations from first-world nations. The last thing the people of poor nations need is yet another imperialist band of profit-minded corporations telling them to get injected.
Haven’t we already learned what happens when drug companies are allowed to exploit the people of poor nations? Pfizer, for example, exploited the children of Nigeria to run illegal drug experiments (http://www.naturalnews.com/026685_P…). This cost the drug company $75 million in a class action settlement, and it cemented the company’s reputation as an evil killer in the minds of many.
It’s obvious to the leaders of such nations that drug companies have no interest in actually helping their people; they’re only interested in exploiting them for profit. This UN scare story is just another first-world tactic to funnel yet more money to the drug companies who will only harm the populations of poor nations.
It’s not enough to vaccinate all the people in wealthy nations, you see. The drug companies have realized they’ll make more money if they can sell even more vaccines and anti-viral drugs to people outside the countries where such pharmaceuticals can be readily afforded. But because poor nations can’t afford to pay Big Pharma’s monopoly prices for these items, the only way to collect on the vaccinations of the world’s poor is to make sure wealthy nations front the cash. That’s the real point behind this UN scare report, in my view.
First world nations are at greater risk
But the UN has it all wrong in the first place. If H1N1 becomes a raging pandemic, it’s not the poor nations of the world that are most at risk: It’s first-world nations like the United States.
Why? For several reasons:
• People in the U.S. work indoors and are more vitamin D deficiency than people in poorer nations. Thus, they are far more vulnerable to pandemic viral infections.
• People in the U.S. have largely abandoned indigenous medicine, so when the vaccines and anti-virals run out, they have no other options. People in poor nations, on the other hand, generally have local knowledge about medicinal, anti-viral plants and medicines.
• As a highly complex, specialized society, the U.S. is far more susceptible to cascading collapse than poor nations that aren’t very far removed from their agrarian ways. In many ways, poor nations can’t really “collapse” because they’re already operating at a very basic level. The U.S., on the other hand, has a long way to fall.
Of course, first-world nations think their medical technology will save everyone. But this is a dangerous and wild assumption that completely ignores two important facts:
Fact #1) There aren’t enough hospital beds in countries like the U.S. to treat even 5% of the population during a pandemic.
Fact #2) All the vaccines and anti-viral drugs relied on by first-world nations can be rendered utterly useless virtually overnight if the virus mutates to a resistant form.
Essentially, first-world nations are highly arrogant about their western medicine, and they tend to think that “poor” nations are helpless without vaccines and pharmaceuticals. But the reality is often the opposite: Poor nations in South America, for example, are sitting on a huge medicine chest of natural anti-viral plants growing across the continent, and the locals still remember how to use those medicines. Brazil, in particular, has enough natural medicine to treat not only its entire population, but the population of the entire South American continent if they chose to harvest and prepare those medicines. Peru is in a similarly advantageous situation, as is Bolivia.
It is only the reliance on western pharmaceuticals that makes these nations vulnerable during a pandemic. Any nation that ignores its own natural medicines and chooses to rely on the patented, monopoly-priced vaccines and drugs from Big Pharma is setting itself up for disaster. Indeed, the chaos scenarios described by the UN may come true, but only if poor nations abandon their roots and surrender their medical sovereignty to western pharmaceutical companies.
The smartest thing any nation can do about swine flu right now is to run public service announcements teaching their populations about vitamin D, healthy dietary habits and immune-boosting herbal medicine. That’s the way to protect the people of the world from any pandemic. Chemical intervention offers no long-term solutions because it doesn’t provide true immunity. It only sets people up for a far worse future infection that wreaks even more havoc on peoples’ vaccine-compromised immune systems.
Make no mistake: The mass vaccination of the populations in poor nations is just another form of medical imperialism designed to make those nations dependent on first-world pharmaceutical products. The same kind of games are played with finance, agricultural products (GM seeds) and consumer products, too. Drug companies want to expand their markets into poor nations. They want to compromise the immune systems of an entire generation, creating future repeat business from these people who will need more advanced (and expensive) medical procedures that eventually stem from the long-term side effects of vaccines: Liver damage, neurological damage, autoimmune disorders, etc. (Bill Gates, by the way, is helping them do it by donating millions of dollars for global vaccination campaigns.)
This is all about marketing, folks. It’s a marketing conspiracy between the United Nations and Big Pharma to scare up another billion customers for Big Pharma.
Click here to read the full report.
Patients Suffer Complications After Swine Flu Misdiagnosed
September 20, 2009
The Telegraph
By Paul Stokes
Over a third of GP surgeries have seen patients suffering complications after being misdiagnosed with swine flu including at least three deaths, a survey suggests.
Family doctors have reported effects ranging from mild adverse reactions to the antiviral drug Tamiflu to severe case of tonsillitis, meningitis and pneumonia.
Three out of 205 family doctors and practice managers surveyed by the health magazine Pulse reported a patient dying after being misdiagnosed.
Ninety one percent of those polled called on the Government to review its policy of offering Tamiflu to all patients with swine flu symptoms.
The findings have been published within days of Government figures showing a jump in the number of swine flu cases in the last week.
Experts have been predicting a second wave of the disease will hit the UK in the winter months after a lull during the summer break.
There have been 67 deaths linked to the virus in England, nine in Scotland, two in Northern Ireland and one in Wales.
More than 1.3 million people have been assed via the National Pandemic Flu Service for England with 522,890 collecting anti-viral drugs.
The Government is currently waiting for European regulators to license a swine flu vaccine before issuing it to health workers and at-risk groups across the UK.
Earlier this month prescribing experts called for the NHS to urgently review the use of Tamiflu, with concerns that the public has been misled about the effectiveness of the drug.
One GP, who did not want to be identified, told Pulse that a patient had died from meningitis after being wrongly diagnosed over the telephone.
Two other practices, in Dorset and Wiltshire, also reported that one of their patients had died. There has been a range of lesser side-effect to anti-viral treatment including, diarrhoea, vomiting and lethargy.
Dr Ellen Wright, a GP in Greenwich, south London, whose son contracted swine flu early in the first wave, said mild adverse reactions to anti-viral drugs had been widely reported.
She added: “There have been a lot of complications, especially in children given it in schools at the beginning of the outbreak, and I suspect that is what a lot of GPs have been seeing.”
A family doctor in Derbyshire reported the case a three year old girl who was diagnosed with swine flu and prescribed Tamiflu by the National Pandemic Flu Service.
She was later found to have bacterial pneumonia and admitted to hospital a few days later.
The GP said: “It was unlikely she ever had swine flu. It is near-impossible to diagnose a febrile illness over the phone, and I am afraid one could miss meningitis or other serious illnesses by presuming it is wine flu.”
Another GP in Tyne and Wear reported that one of her patients who was initially thought to have swine flu was later diagnosed with salmonella.
The patient was later admitted to hospital after extreme dehydration as a result of the food poisoning.
A deal has been struck with GPs in the UK, who will receive £5.25 for each dose of the swine flu vaccine they give to patients.
It is hoped that at-risk groups, such as those with diabetes or asthma, will be able to get their normal seasonal flu jab at the same time.
However, GPs are being told not to hold off starting the seasonal flu vaccine programme until the swine flu vaccine arrives.
A total of 132 million doses have been ordered by the UK Government – enough for the entire population with two doses each.
Click here for full report from The Telegraph
Pharma Pushing Virus Theory for Blood Pressure: Thinly-Veiled Attempt to Push “Blood Pressure Vaccine”
September 19, 2009
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
A new study suggesting that a common virus might play a role in hypertension has some suggesting that a vaccine might be developed against high blood pressure.
Researchers from Harvard Medical School found in laboratory studies that the herpes variant cytomegalovirus (CMV), carried in the body of 60 to 99 percent of people worldwide, increases blood vessel inflammation and causes high blood pressure in mice.
“Some cases of hypertension might be treated or prevented by antiviral therapy or a vaccine against CMV,” researcher Clyde Crumpacker said.
In one study, researchers observed elevated levels of renin, an enzyme that causes high blood pressure, in the kidneys of mice and the blood vessels of humans infected with CMV. Infection with the virus also led to elevated levels of inflammation markers in blood vessels.
The study “may suggest a whole new way of looking at high blood pressure and vascular disease,” Crumpacker said.
In another study, the researchers infected mice with CMV and found that all of them developed high blood pressure. Half the mice were fed a high-fat diet four weeks before and six weeks after infection, while the others were fed a normal diet. A full 30 percent of mice on the high-fat diet developed hardened arteries in addition to high blood pressure.
“This strongly suggests that the CMV infection and the high cholesterol diet might be working together,” Crumpacker said.
A number of companies, including GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Sanofi-Aventis and Vical are already at work on a CMV vaccine. While the virus rarely produces symptoms in healthy adults, it can cause harm to people with compromised immune systems and can produce birth defects in infants exposed prenatally.
Drugmaker Roche currently produces an antiviral drug to prevent CMV infection after organ transplants, a time when the immune system is typically weakened.
Nearly all adults age 40 and older have been exposed to the CMV at some point.
Click here for the full report from Natural News
